Crossing over from acclaimed poet and spoken word artist to the increasingly close-minded music industry seems an impossible task. It helps when you’re incredibly talented and have the brass to put together one of the year’s best and most challenging records. Saul Williams’ The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust is a forward-thinking mash up of raw punk energy, future sounds and hip-hop soul. Doing what very few artists in history have been able to do, Saul Williams has put together a political record that doesn’t sacrifice artfulness or energy in favor of a “message.” Sounding like the half-mad ghost of long dead Nintendos or the stomp of thousands of angry laptops, Niggy Tardust is a genre-twisting beast. ANTIGRAVITY talked to Williams about the connection between punk and rap, the concepts behind his new record and making music without history.

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What is it about playing a record that feels so natural, so sensual? Is it the warm sizzle that shivers up through the needle, the soft punch of the bass, the steady, hypnotic spin of the turntable or album covers the size of a children’s book? It’s a lost art, really, the manipulation of grooved vinyl, pouring songs back and forth into one another so they wash over the dance floor as one never-ending wave—or cutting sound into a thousand patterned pieces, amplifying the ecstatic flicker of fingertips for all to hear. Music nowadays seems like it happens in a digital fog; the gears of our listening devices are atomized and hidden behind an opaque plastic shell, the “search” for music no more engaging than email, entire collections measured in weeks and months existing only as fragments on a magnet. That a select few still burden themselves with crate after crate of LPs and 45s, boxes of cables, mixers and, of course, the heavy motors of two direct-drive turntables, all for the sake of bringing a good time to anyone who shows up, a chance to connect spiritually to something that drives the entire universe—is nothing short of a miracle. (more…)

If you don’t know someone—I mean really know them in the sense that you’ve made some emotional connection with them, gone out drinking with them, had that mystical one-night stand with them, sat on a back porch playing guitar with them, even if only once—if you haven’t warmed your cold hands on another person’s soul, can you really care what happens to them? If you have looked, however quickly, into a person’s heart and tried to understand them, how can you possibly turn away when that person is in pain? (more…)